Wednesday, March 26, 2014: MIT researchers led by Timothy Lu, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and biological engineering here are currently working on a unique ‘biofilm’ that combines bacterial cells with nonliving materials like gold nanoparticles and can conduct electricity or emit light. These hybrid biofilms might soon make it possible to create circuits for photovoltaic solar panels or act as biosensors to sense toxins. The research is touted to have wide-scale applications when available commercially.
E. coli bacteria was used during the initial experiments chiefly since biofilms produced using this kind of bacteria contain ‘curli fibres’. These fibres are actually protein chains that help material attach to surfaces. These can also be modified by adding peptides, which readily trap nonliving nanoparticles (gold etc). The resulting biofilm can reproduce (via living bacteria) and conduct electricity (via non living gold nanoparticles). “It’s an interesting way of thinking about materials synthesis, which is very different from what people do now, which is usually a top-down approach,” lead researcher Timothy Lu was quoted as saying.
Furthermore, the bacterial cells can communicate with other cells in the vicinity and remold the composition of the biofilm depending upon the nonliving material involved. “It’s a really simple system but what happens over time is you get curli that’s increasingly labeled by gold particles. It shows that indeed you can make cells that talk to each other and they can change the composition of the material over time. Ultimately, we hope to emulate how natural systems, like bone, form. No one tells bone what to do, but it generates a material in response to environmental signals.” Lu added.
